Savas Parastatidis, MSc., PhD.Principal
Developer/Philosopher*, Technical Computing Cloud,
Microsoft
Visiting Fellow, University of Newcastle
upon Tyne
The timeline of my professional whereabouts so far...
I was born (15 April 1973) in
Xanthi, a northern Greek city, and lived there for the first
18 years of my life. My family home is located just 3km away
from Xanthi, at a small village called Petinos, part of the
municipality of Vistonida.
I moved to
Thessaloniki, the second largest city in Greece, and stayed
there for 4 memorable years (1991-1995) while studying at the
Department of Information
Technology,
Technological Educational Institute
of Thessaloniki.
From
Thessaloniki, I jumped to Leeds and the
Leeds Metropolitan University to do my placement through the
Erasmus student-exchange program.
At the end of my placement, I moved to
Newcastle upon Tyne
and followed the advanced M.Sc. course in Computer Software and
Systems Design (CSSD) at the
School of Computing Science,
University of Newcastle upon Tyne.
Newcastle continued to be my home while I was
reading towards my Doctor of Philosophy degree with
Prof. Paul Watson, which I completed in 2000. I then worked
as a post-doctoral researcher for the
HiPPO project and as a Senior Software Engineer at the HP
Arjuna Labs.
At the end of 2001, I had to return back to Greece in order to do
my military service (in Greece it is still obligatory); the most
unproductive time of my adult life.
In 2003, I returned to Newcastle to
become the Chief Software Architect of the
North-East Regional e-Science
Centre and work again closely with
Prof. Paul
Watson.
At Newcastle, I also held the title of Principal
Research Associate
at the School of Computing
Science,
University of Newcastle upon Tyne.
In September 2005 and after many great
years in Newcastle, I moved to Redmond to work
for Microsoft as a Program
Manager at the Connected Systems Division.
In 2006,
Tony Hey, Corporate Vice President for Technical Computing
then, persuaded me to join his newly created team as an
Architect.
In early 2007, the entire team moved to
Microsoft Research,
where
Tony Hey took over the External Research team.
After more than two memorable years with
Tony Hey and his team, I moved to
Live Search to work on my
crazy ideas around semantics and structured data.
* "Software Philosopher"?
Here's why.